I opened one of the books haphazard.... I had alighted on Augustin Thierry. I read--I am mistaken, I did not read, I devoured--that marvellous work on the early kings by the author of the _Conquête des Normands_; then the sort of historical tableaux entitled _Récits Mérovingiens._ Then, without needing to open Chateaubriand, all the ghosts of those kings, standing on the threshold of monarchy, appeared before me, from the moment when they were made visible to the eyes of the learned chronicler--from Clodio, _whose scouts reported that Gaul is the noblest of countries, full of all kinds of wealth, and planted with forests of fruit trees,_ who was the first to wield the Frankish rule over the Gauls, to the great and religious-minded Karl, _rising from table filled with a great fear, standing for a long time by a window which looked to the east, with arms crossed, weeping without stanching his tears,_ because he saw on the horizon the Norman vessels. I saw, in fact, visions which I had never suspected hitherto, a whole living world of people of twelve centuries ago, in the dark and deep abysses of the past. I remained spellbound. Until that moment I had believed Clovis and Charlemagne were the ancestors of Louis XIV.; but here, under the pen of Augustin Thierry, a new kind of geography was revealed, each race flowed by separately, following its own particular channel through the ages: Gauls, as vast as a lake, Romans, as noble as a river, Franks, as terrible as a flood, Huns, Burgundians, West-Goths as devouring and rapid as torrents. Something equivalent to what happened in me at General Foy's repeated itself. I perceived that, during the nine years which had rolled by, I had learnt nothing or next to nothing; I remembered my conversation with Lassagne; I understood that there was more to see in the past than in the future; I was ashamed of my ignorance, and I pressed my head convulsively between my hands. Why, then, did not those who knew produce their knowledge? Oh! I did not know at that period with what fatherly goodness God treats men; how he makes some into miners who extract gold and diamonds from the earth, of others, the goldsmiths who cut and mount them. I did not know that God had made Augustin Thierry a miner and me a goldsmith.